Calypso March Intro

Well hey there snakepunks and snakeporks! It’s your number one fella, me, here with a fresh hot comic that just dropped onto the site. That’s right, we got an 11-page minicomic introducing an all-new character- CALYPSO MARCH! March is one of the Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited characters who got stitched into Valiant Stars canon after the Fifth Anthropocene Dataclysm. A street racer in the Dead-Hand Vipers and a courier on the side- well, hey, why should I say it twice? We’ve whipped up a Datasheet for her at the end of the comic, so go on and read it! And if you can’t be bothered with that, then don’t worry, the information is replicated in the Character Index.

But here’s something that doesn’t really fit into the comic- you know what we haven’t talked about much yet? The toys! Toy lines for The Valiant Stars were really something. It’s also relevant to Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited, because Laughing Lizard used the series launch as an excuse to redesign their entire product catalogue.

OK, from the top- there were toys for Kobra Stallion, but they weren’t that successful. The original line was characters only, in 1:6 scale- around the size of a Barbie doll. The manufacture was pretty high quality and they had great articulation, but they were a bit fragile and didn’t really stand up to sustained play. There also weren’t many accessories or play sets, so you really had to bring your imagination to bear. The head of Laughing Lizard’s toy division at the time, Orestes Pluck, felt like going with bigger figurines with expensive manufacturing would jive with what he perceived as the show’s “mature” appeal. Really they were more like what you’d expect from an anime figurine in your timeline- high quality, but meant to be posed and mounted as a show piece, not really a toy in the way that a He-Man action figure is, y’know? Kind of ahead of their time in one way, but not a huge profit stream for Laughing Lizard. Pluck eventually retired around the time of Jet Generation hitting the small screen, and his replacement, Titania Schnell, had a totally different vision for The Valiant Stars’ toy line.

Schnell catches some flack here and there for being really corporate and not much of a creative type, all in all a pretty stark contrast from most of the Laughing Lizard big names. But you gotta hand it to her, she knew what was going on with toys in the late 80s and early 90s and knew what she had on her hands with The Valiant Stars. Her mandate was simple: smaller toys, cheaper manufacturing, but more accessories, playsets, and secondary items like vehicles and exotic gear. This is, in retrospect, a great fit for The Valiant Stars, a series with hundreds of characters, all of whom have some kind of iconic piece of kit. The new line of toys were scaled down from 1:6 to 1:12 (about 6 inches high) and were entirely hard plastic (the original toys had included fabric clothes). Each figure came with a smattering of 2-3 accessories, usually at least one weapon and one piece of removable gear like a backpack. The figures were released in lines of five, with four “regular” figures and a “deluxe” figure that usually came with some larger accessory, and lines culminated in a playset depicting some set piece that tied the five characters together.

By way of example, the set that included Calypso March comprised five Dead Hand Vipers street racing characters: March herself, Peaches Carradine (with short-blaster, armoured cowl, and backup revolvogun), Boomer Kuroda (with rebar clubs, custom pilot’s helmet, and remote piloting jack), Fenchurch Blisk (with Gaunson relic blaster, custom pilot’s helmet, and remote piloting jack- I’ll admit they kind of phoned it in with both Blisk and Kuroda being pilots), and Hollywood Starkiller (with Karzakovian power bow, racer’s cape, and Wardrive). Yeah that’s right, Hollywood Starkiller! Schnell wanted to use the better-known characters as a springboard to sell the line but it meant that characters who’d existed in the canon prior to Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited got grandfathered in to the new sets- for a while, every line had a Zap Jockey. Calypso March was the deluxe figure in the line and came with a to-scale Turbocycle, scattergun, racing helmet, and a couple of generic cargo packs that fit into the panniers on the back of the Turbocycle. The playset that tied it all together was the “Dead Hand Raceway,” a set of modular towers and bits of rubble that could be fitted with different banners to make a start/finish line, plus a pair of mounted laser cannons. It’s not regarded as one of the better sets, it was a little sparse- the idea was that, since the Dead Hand Vipers set up and tear down their raceways in places where street racing is illegal, so too could you assemble their finish line in the middle of other playsets. Of course, if you lacked any other playsets (or the requisite imagination to use mismatched bits of other toys like the rest of us), then all you had was a sparse collection of towers without many features- not much of a playset unto itself. Good thing it wasn’t the inaugural set or things might not have gone as well as they did for Laughing Lizard!

Anyway, that’s a lot of talk for now, so I’ll cap it there- but there’s more in the future, so read the comics and keep your signal-scanners on! I gotta jet outta here before the Binary Order zeroes my location, so until next time-

Stay Vigilant, Stay Valiant
Bruce